Disclosures

We are developing a project for Disclosures which takes place between January and March 2008 at Gasworks.

An ongoing project to create a copyleft licensed 12 inch vinyl scratch tool or battle record containing a range of samples, beats and extracts made from the out-of-copyright 1920s and 30s blues, jazz and folk housed in the Open Music Archive. In the hands of a turntablist, the record player is revealed as a hardware instrument – one that needs vinyl software to operate. The DJ’s instrument can only be activated using a set of vinyl tools, in the same way that computer hardware requires an operating system and a suite of software to function. Unlike the conventional battle record, which samples unlicensed commercial recordings, the new scratch tool will be assembled entirely from out-of-copyright material. The project adopts the form and structure of the battle record to build open vinyl code – which, like free/libre and open source software, is distributed freely.